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Somalia on the tip of the Horn of Africa has been inhabited as far back as BC Its history is as rich as the country is old Caught up in a decades-long civil war Somalia along with Iraq and Afghanistan has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world Getting there from North America is a forty-five-hour five-flight voyage through Frankfurt Dubai Djibouti Bossaso on the Gulf of Aden and finally Galkayo Somalia is a place where a government has been built out of anarchyFor centuries stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world The recent bands of daring ragtag pirates off the coast of Somalia hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern eraThe capture of the American-crewed cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April the first United States ship to be hijacked in almost two centuries catapulted the Somali pirates onto prime-time news Then with the horrific killing by Somali pirates of four Americans two of whom had built their dream yacht and were sailing around the world ldquoAnd now on to Angkor Wat And Burmardquo they had written to friends the United States Navy Special Operation Forces FBI Justice Department and the worldrsquos military forces were put on notice the Somali seas were now the most perilous in the worldJay Bahadur a journalist who dared to make his way into the remote pirate havens of Africarsquos easternmost country and spend months infiltrating their lives gives us the first close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of war-ravaged SomaliaBahadurrsquos riveting narrative exposeacutemdashthe first evermdashlooks at who these men are how they live the forces that created piracy in Somalia how the pirates spend the ransom money how they deal with their hostages Bahadur makes sense of the complex and fraught regional politics the history of Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland an autonomous region in northeast Somalia and the various catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate destinies The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state of Puntland is dealing with the risemdashand increasing sophisticationmdashof piracy and how through legal and military action other nations international shippers the United Nations and various international bodies are attempting to cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisisA revelation of a world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.
